Merrill Lynch has selected Fiserv’s CheckFree Frontier 2.0TM as its strategic reconciliation platform.
After an evaluation process, Merrill Lynch chose the Fiserv application based on specific performance benchmarking results and demonstrations of its ability to further mitigate potential operational risk, minimize support costs and provide a seamless migration from Merrill Lynch’s existing platform.
“Through a successful proof-of-concept, CheckFree Frontier demonstrated the flexibility to accommodate fluctuations and growth in transaction volumes. Our solution performed identical tasks at least ten times faster than previously, while giving Merrill Lynch the ability to support multiple lines of business across many sites. We are also confident that by further automating the reconciliation process, we will help Merrill Lynch to minimize costs, focus on exceptions more quickly and provide better transparency to meet compliance requirements, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II and similar standards,” says Mark Cappell, senior vice president and general manager, Operational Risk Management, CheckFree, now part of Fiserv.
CheckFree Transfer Manager, a module of CheckFree Frontier, will also be used as part of the implementation to enable Merrill Lynch to migrate from its current system to CheckFree Frontier. The module is a business rules transfer and system consolidation tool that is designed to significantly reduce the human intervention required to transition business rules and administrative configurations to a new production environment.
By using an audited change control process that addresses the separation of duties required for regulatory compliance, CheckFree Transfer Manager is expected to enable Merrill Lynch to protect their sensitive financial data and ensure integrity of controls throughout the migration process.
“CheckFree proved that they had the capabilities and project methodology to seamlessly migrate our existing solution to CheckFree Frontier and support our exponential business growth. Through this implementation, we will be able to consolidate our reconciliation instances significantly, in line with our defined business areas, and increase our efficiency and minimize the system operating costs typically associated with the middle and back office. With a more accurate view of information across the enterprise, we can ensure better management and transparency across offices in different locations, while enhancing our ability to serve our clients,” adds Andrew McKibben, Change & Support Services, GMI Services Technology, Merrill Lynch.
This implementation builds upon CheckFree’s existing 12-year business relationship with Merrill Lynch and Fiserv’s long standing relationship with Merrill Lynch as well.